Isar Aerospace rocket launch: infinite scope for upgrades

A rocket launch is an industrial spectacle. People gather at the space stations with folding chairs and binoculars. You see a pillar of light spiraling into the sky and feel a thundering sound through your chest.

This was also the case last Saturday evening, shortly after ten, on the Norwegian Arctic island of Andøya. There were five small satellites on board. What the rocket from the Bavarian start-up Isar Aerospace was charged in the hours afterwards weighed significantly more.

For the first time, a private European company has reached orbit from mainland Europe. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) immediately reported: “This is the beginning of a new era.” The company itself described the flight in its press release as a turning point for Europe. The Federal Research Ministry, led by Space Minister Dorothee Bär (CSU), announced: “Germany can do space travel.”

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Company boss Daniel Metzler, who runs a business and sells launch services, did not talk about market shares but said: “Europe now has sovereign access to space.” He obviously knows which sentence opens the wallet. More than half of the inquiries to Isar Aerospace now come from the military sector, Metzler himself reported this in the spring. A Norwegian officer and NATO “space leader” was also on site in Andøya.

What applies to Isar Aerospace applies to the industry. According to the European Space Policy Institute, in 2025, almost a third of private investments in European space start-ups went to companies with business in security and defense. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) announced in September 2025 at the space congress of the industry association BDI that he would invest around 35 billion euros from the defense budget in a “space security architecture” by 2030.

An industry that has cultivated a decidedly civilian self-image for decades is being brought closer to the defense industry with public money in a very short space of time. There is a very real reason for this. Wars on Earth are increasingly being decided in orbit.

Satellite-based internet controls drone warfare and brings videos from the front to the world. Navigation satellites provide data for target detection. Earth observation satellites show columns of tanks in front of the city and provide the images that can be used to prove war crimes. The Russian massacre in Bucha, Ukraine in 2022, for example, or the US attack on an Iranian girls' school in Tehran in 2026.

But there is also a second point to the truth. The rearmament is intended to provide a growth boost that the European economy can no longer find elsewhere. And space travel is the part of it that looks like the future.

Space appears to be the current iteration of what geographer and political theorist David Harvey calls the spatial way out. Capitalism never heals its internal contradictions, it postpones them and looks for new spaces when the old ones are exhausted.

Something happens in orbit that makes it particularly attractive to billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The rules there are either not yet written or are not enforceable. There is no limit value for rocket exhaust gases in the stratosphere. Virtually no one is liable for collisions in orbit.

A space industry that takes care of the timely disposal of its satellites, pays for its soot particles and pays for its light pollution will not exist in our economic system. Near-Earth space is profitable precisely because it is done cheaply. Whoever appears there first and with the most capital determines the rules according to which this new space will be exploited in the future.

So now we're heading up from Europe into orbit.